Thursday, October 04, 2012

O'Brien: With Oracle vulnerable, CEO Larry Ellison embarks on final battle to shape his legacy - San Jose Mercury News

A timely Oracle/Salesforce.com reality check

"OpenWorld comes just a couple of weeks after cloud-computing rival Salesforce.com held its Dreamforce gathering. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Ellison have a well-known rivalry, and Benioff has long taunted Ellison for being slow to get with the cloud trend.
Dreamforce attracted 90,000 attendees. This year, OpenWorld had an estimated 50,000 attendees. Aside from the ego bump of having the title of largest tech conference in the world, you have to wonder if users are starting to vote with both their feet and their IT budget dollars.
Oracle as underdog? Probably not. But then, this is just the type of dogfight Ellison has always relished. And the stakes for him and the company are both big and dramatic."